PROJECT OVERVIEW

Underlying many contemporary tensions and issues in our country are our own unexamined biases. Though unavoidable, these biases pose challenges to progress across political, personal, and professional domains.

By learning to navigate them within ourselves and educating others on the role of bias in society, we can collectively learn to wield them more wisely and promote proper education for future generations.

To engage potential change agents with these ideas and facilitate self-reflection and action, we believe it is essential to incorporate an emotive, experiential medium. With this in mind, we designed a one-night Art Show & Science Exhibit, entitled, “It’s Only Human: Exploring the Biases that Shape Our World”.

The exhibits for this event will subsequently be compiled into a hardcover and e-book. In addition to general sales, these books will be freely distributed to teachers and trainers nationwide as a resource for introducing their students to their own biases.

All proceeds will benefit the work of The People’s Science. As such, all donations made to support this event are tax deductible.

ORGANIZATION OVERVIEW

The People’s Science is a 501(c)3 non-profit that started as a collaboration between educators and researchers at Harvard Graduate School of Education and Stanford University. The mission of The People’s Science is to improve access to high quality and accessible science, and to foster people’s understanding of themselves, others, and information. Towards this end, we develop and share practical STEM engagement tools and resources that promote digital, media, scientific, and psychological literacy.

We believe that STEM education and 21st century information literacy is critical to a healthy society. We also aim to dismantle the barriers between science, society, and the individual by curating an experience where scientists, educators, and artists collaborate to bring attention to the research that's relevant to our daily lives.

PARTICIPATION OVERVIEW

Many modern STEM resources and content are riddled with sensationalization and misinformation. Scientists play a essential role in ensuring that the learners who engage with this content are offered both cutting-edge and responsibly reported research. Our contributing researchers serve as critical editors, and we look to them for the stamp of approval prior to releasing research claims.

Here's what you can do:

FOR THE EVENTAdd your voice to the event by joining our editing team. Each art piece in the exhibit is paired with a few themes from psychological or neuroscience. We synthesize relevant evidence and prepare it for a popular audience. Our team of editing scientists can review these summaries and provide feedback to ensure it is responsibly communicated. If you're interested in joining the team as an editor, let us know.

FOR THE BOOKThe book will feature the topics and art from the event, as well as additional topics. There will be a total of 25 topics and each will be broken down into sections that feature: (i) artwork and the story behind it, (ii) overview of the relevant societal or personal issue, (iii) summary of an underlying cognitive mechanism/bias, and (iv) practical suggestions for navigating it in the future.

Researchers and the TPS team will agree upon a single topic that is highly relevant to the researcher's expertise. We will work with you to craft the final copy (not to exceed one page) summarizing the research on that particular bias. It is up to the researcher whether they would like to spearhead the writing of the piece, or collaborate with our writers to complete it.

We will ask that you review and provide feedback on any infographics or additional content that we include in your topic's section. It's important to us that contributing researchers approve their section of the book.

We estimate that participation in this project will take a total commitment of 5-7 hours from our scientists, over the course of 9 months.

BENEFITS OF PARTICIPATION

This theme was selected due to the pressing issues we face as a society. We believe that improving people's understanding of self, societal, and information bias is crucial to an informed, healthy, and responsible citizenship. Your contribution enables us to share this high quality and unique resource freely with educators, who can facilitate reflection and dialogue in their classroom or workshops to affect serious change.

In addition, this project will make it possible for The People's Science to continue to do our work providing practical STEM education, designing new infrastructure for the dissemination of science, and facilitating information literacy skills in the general public.

Our work cannot be done without you. The researcher's voice is a critical component of effective and responsible STEM outreach. We will do everything we can to make this an exciting and minimal commitment for you, and in return we can offer the following:

One ticket to the "It's Only Human" event ($95 value)

One hardcopy of the "It's Only Human" book ($35 value)

Recognition and profile on the project's website

Byline for contributing section in the "It's Only Human" book

CRITERIA & SCIENTIST SELECTION

The integrity of the scientific work in this project is of the utmost importance to us. As such, we are looking for researchers with expertise in cognitive biases or related psychological phenomena. We are narrowing our focus to 15 topics for the event, and 25 topics for the book, thus we are also limiting the number of contributing researchers in suit.

We apologize that not all interested researchers may be able to participate, but encourage you to sign-up for our researcher newsletter to be kept in the loop about the many future opportunities that may arise!

If you believe you are a good fit for the project, please let us know. We look forward to hearing from you!